What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Hoping to fashion a mirror, the lover doth polish the face of his beloved until he produces a skull.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

...but with his mother there's no question of liking him they're not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson - the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.